Dive Brief:
- While less than a third of admissions officers say they check students' social media, the practice is growing and many colleges do not have firm policies on it.
- Admissions officials shared anecdotes about sometimes rejecting an applicant because of material found online.
- A lawyer specializing in social media law says looking at posts online is dangerous because colleges might wrongly identify the account of a person with the same name as a prospective student.
Dive Insight:
Students have little to gain from having their postings publicly available. It’s hard to find a story of an admissions officer stumbling across something positive and throwing open the gates of the university to a student. The advice for sharing judiciously on social media goes for college faculty, too, as we’ve seen.